Chip market starts year brightly

LONDON – The three-month average for global chip sales in January was $24.05 billion, an increase of 3.8 percent from January 2012 when sales were $23.16 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

The averaged number for January 2013 was 2.8 percent lower than the December 2012 total of $24.74 billion, reflecting normal seasonal trends, the SIA said.

The Americas region posted its highest sales total of any January since 2001. Regionally, year-over-year sales increased in the Americas by 10.5 percent and in the Asia-Pacific region by 7.8 percent. However, in Europe they decreased by 4.9 percent and Japan by 12.3 percent.

Monthly data is given by the SIA as a three-month average, although the source of the data, the WSTS organization, tracks actual monthly data. The SIA and other regional semiconductor industry bodies opt to use averaged data because it smoothes out the actual data that typically show troughs at the beginnings of the quarters and peaks at the ends of the quarters.

"Led by continuing strength in the Americas, the global semiconductor industry has built on its momentum from the end of 2012 with an encouraging start to 2013, but ongoing economic uncertainty is holding back more robust growth," said Brian Toohey, CEO of the SIA, in a statement.

Click on image to enlarge.

Global three-month averaged chip sales for January 2013 by region in U.S. dollar billions. Source SIA

@Bruzzer
The sales are an extrapolated global estimate based on the sales figures tended by about 55 leading chip companies.
Intel and AMD both withdrew cooperation from WSTS (http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4237197/Intel--AMD-leave-WSTS). As far as I know they have not resumed membership.

Hi Peter - back calculating the actual January sales from the SIA published 3MMA sales number, quoted in your article above, yields $22.804 billion. Plugging this actual sales result into the Cowan LRA Model yields an overall 2013 sales forecast of $310.402 billion which corresponds to sales growth expectation of 6.5 percent. These two results are preliminary pending the official release of January's actual sales by the WSTS - expected by the end of this week, that is March 8th. Once the January actual sales is published the Cowan LRA Model will be rerun and 2013 quarterly sales numbers will also be derived
Mike Cowan